The Worm that Turned
Australians have gone green with alacrity in recent months. Environmentalism has finally evolved from a sort of underground movement, a smoky bar filled with eco warriors furtively discussing electric car brands, to the poster boy of the twenty first century.
There was only an article in the paper last week featuring a father/son couple who couldn’t afford petrol, so they run their battered old ute on used oil from the local chippie. The oil’s free of course since the chippie would only chuck it out. When I suggested to my husband what a genius solution this was to all the world’s problems, he pointed out the chippie probably only makes enough oil to run a handful of cars.
Even so. I might not be able to recycle our cooking oil, but I am finally inspired to worm up. Our household kitchen waste is embarrassingly high and while we separate all the recycling and soft plastics, food waste is another matter.
After careful study of the worm farm range at Bunnings I select a drum shaped device. Lucky I read the instructions before purchasing as it appeared you had to buy the worms separately. This is a trap for young players, which I was happily wise to. (A bit like the days when mechanical toys came without batteries, a mistake made only one Christmas amongst all others). There were two brands of composting worms on offer, if worms could be considered brandable. One of them was vacuum packed, which whilst a handy space saving option felt unnecessarily cruel to the worms. Also, it was impossible to tell if they were even alive. I picked a larger box still claiming to hold one thousand worms and threw in some worm conditioner for good measure, banishing the absurd image of a stylish invertebrate with silky hair from my head.
Back home, things start off well. I set up the farm, expand the hemp block in water and sprinkle my worms into the receptacle. There surely doesn’t seem like a thousand worms, not that I can count them, and at five cents a pop, every worm has a job to do. Plus they are all different shapes and sizes. Google reveals there are over twenty thousand species of worm, including one that grows to thirty metres - about the same length as three family cars. I sincerely hope there are none of those beasts in my kit (there certainly can’t be a thousand of them) and let them settle in for a couple of days as per instruction. Then, into the farm go my kitchen scraps, along with compostable baking paper and the bag itself, also compostable. Hooray!
A week later another bucket of scraps has been collected. But the old scraps don’t seem to have gone down. Not one bit. There’s a film of fluffy mould forming and not a lot of decomposition happening.
Hasty consultation with neighbours reveals I’ve been far too optimistic. Anything remotely of a size (all the paper, avocado skins, banana peel) has no chance in a worm farm. For best results, scraps need to be shredded before adding them, and eggshells pre crushed. I gloomily fish the big bits back out and take stock. (Side note – my neighbours are all super green - half of them have chickens and keep bees. And have stickers on their bins declaring ‘I’m On A No Food Waste Diet Thanks!’)
Time has passed, and I’m cautiously optimistic. My worms seem to have stepped up. There was much wriggling action last time I lifted the blanket, and the scraps were definitely diminished. But maybe the day will come when cars will be able to run on kitchen scraps, like Doc Brown’s DeLorean at the end of Back to the Future. Now that would be worth buying into.